Although they could not send forth anguished cries from their graves, it was ultimately for Jules Wain that Mr. Tomlinson and Mary Ellen Vestry had died.
Sixteen
A MUTUAL attraction between Jules Wain and Celia was not the wildly unlikely circumstance that it might have seemed.
For her part, Celia recognized that in this man she would come closer to fulfilling all the aims of her life than she had dared to hope. Jules Wain was fifty—but a trim, squash-and-swimming fifty, and in any case the peculiarly youthful charm of Hugh Stevenson, and later David Macintosh, had long since dissipated. He was a man of considerable wealth and impeccable social position: his wife would find all doors open to her. There were no complicating children from his previous marriage, which had ended several years earlier in divorce. Fairly low on Celia’s list came the fact that he was personable enough in an aloof fashion; the pitting of his heavily tanned skin was attractive rather than otherwise.
Wain was equally analytical in his appraisal of the young woman who was introduced to him as Cecelia Brett. The world was full of ravishing females, and his eye was caught less by her undeniable good looks—those shoulders were like something out of a portrait—than her grace of movement and her air of serenity. She was in fact considerably poised for age thirty—Wain misjudged her, approvingly, by three years—and pleasingly single. Perhaps because his former wife was now one, he did not trust divorcees; his mind stamped them quite simply as rejects, cast off because of some fatal flaw. Something euphemistically called temperament, for instance, as in the case of his Brazilian virago.
None but the most surface of these conclusions was arrived at on that first evening, however, and Celia gave no hint of her incredulous exhilaration as she said casually, “I think I met a connection of yours not long ago—Mrs. Hays-Faulkner?”
This was not much of a gamble, in view of the woman’s flowered-chiffon propriety, and it turned out to be perfectly safe. Jules Wain’s interest in a remote cousin was only deep enough for a courteous lift of the brows and “Oh, Clara’s in New York now? How was she?” but it automatically prompted a second look at Celia and, when he and his party left, a smiling inclination of his head toward the table where she sat.
Celia wondered practically how next to proceed. There could be no overt action on her part; all else aside, men like this one would be put off by anything that smacked even faintly of pursuit. Equally, if she took the job with the Opera Guild’s benefit committee, she would become little more than a glorified secretary, one of an army of faceless, fashionably dressed women.
One hope lay in the fact that, although Jules Wain had of course not asked where she was staying, the chances were that she would meet him again in the natural course of events if she played her cards properly. There had been perhaps a hundred people at the Guild’s little white-tie affair at the Mark Hopkins, a preponderance of whom had appeared to know each other, and Celia sensed that she had passed more than one kind of screening with honors. It was true that she was an extra woman in a segment of society revolving largely within itself, but she was not a plain or aging or penurious woman—and, thanks to Mrs. Hays-Faulkner, she bore an identifying tag.
Accordingly, she told the sponsors from the Guild that she wasn’t actually sure she would settle down in San Francisco—it was so hard to judge a city when you were living in a hotel, wasn’t it?—and of course it wouldn’t be fair to them to have all the trouble of familiarizing her with the job if she decided not to stay on the Coast after all. Would they possibly know of a nice little place she could rent for a few months? Although she hated to be a bother.
The Guild members, who had once been under the impression that they were weighing and studying Celia, now pursued her with the ardency of greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit. Mrs. Wivenhoe found her a small house on a steeply angled street, with iron-grilled windows and an enclosed back garden with a view of the Bay, and languid Mrs. Phelps aroused herself to suggest a christening party.
The party was given, successfully, (“How do you fix those heavenly clams?”) and invitations sprang gratifyingly out of it. The Celia who in New York had taken buses instead of taxis, haunted sales, fed herself as frugally as possible, was soon spending a good deal of money on clothes, liquor—it was a social disaster, she had learned, to attempt economy in this area—and imported delicacies; even flowers, occasionally, for the charmingly furnished house on Theodore Street. Although she was as grasping as she had ever been, she watched the money flow away without a pang, because it was not long before the invitations that included her also included Jules Wain.
No duck-hunter had ever built a better blind.
Celia’s acceptance into this circle was not greatly to be wondered at. She had after all come to San Francisco with the indirect blessing of Mrs. Hays-Faulkner—and who was to know that the consul’s widow had thought she was providing helpful names with a view to a job?—and been presented by Barbara Wivenhoe, who had been a Fitzgerald. She was decorative but not showily so, and the fact that she was not the life of any party was refreshing; her silences were of an enigmatic rather than a tongue-tied nature. She carried with her, more justifiably than any of these people could guess, an aura of personal success and accomplishment, and it was as powerful as the combination to a
